3rd October 2006 Archive

Sun Microsystems continues its march toward supercomputing respectability. The company has won a deal to supply the University of Texas with a system that should easily be one of the fastest on the planet when completed in 2007.

Normally, two virtualization companies with silly names forming a sales partnership would not capture our attention. But, people actually seem to use the software from Cassatt and XenSource, so here we are.

Flaws in the way Firefox handles JavaScript code only crash the browser (at worst), contrary to earlier reports that researchers had identified a zero-day exploit that might lend itself to malware-based attacks.

AMD's 65nm 'Altair' processor, the first desktop chip to be based on the company's next-generation K8L architecture, will debut Q3 2007, various Asian reports claiming to be derived from the firm's roadmaps allege.

I have recently returned from Netezza's second annual conference. This was well attended, with nearly all of the company's customers (around 75) being represented, as well as a significant number of both prospects and partners.

Despite optimism earlier this year that the ozone hole was stabilising and might even have begun to repair itself, scientists at the European Space Agency report that 2006 saw record losses of ozone over the south pole.

Sony Ericsson will this month ship its first true clamshell form-factor phone with a touch-sensitive main display. Dubbed the Z558, the handset will also feature character recognition ready for what the company called "one-touch" text messaging.

Erstwhile Blu-ray Disc backer HP is preparing an external HD DVD drive, it has emerged. The company's also equipping two of its consumer-oriented notebook and media centre systems with drives that support the next-gen optical disc format.

North Korea has announced it will test one of its nuclear warheads, the BBC reports. North Korea's foreign ministry declared: "[North Korea] will in the future conduct a nuclear test under the condition where safety is firmly guaranteed."

AMD looks set to implement a Socket AM2 revision spanning the processor interconnect's current specification and the upcoming Socket AM3 due in 2008. That at least is what reports coming out of Taiwan citing local motherboard-maker sources claim.

Two groups of security researchers have released unofficial patches designed to protect surfers against an outstanding Internet Explorer vulnerability in the absence of available security updates from Microsoft.

Nokia today invited hardware and software makers to join it and implement a new wireless data transfer technology designed to operate over very short distances. Yet the Finnish phone giant insisted the technology, dubbed Wibree, is complementary to Bluetooth.

Blue Coat reckons its new SSL VPN appliance could be the most secure remote access device yet. Not only does Blue Coat RA encrypt the traffic between the client and the host, it also blocks keyloggers and framegrabbers, and encrypts the files it caches onto the client's hard disk.

Tandberg Data is the latest storage vendor to bring out a removable-disk backup product. It says the RDX QuikStor combines the portability and simplicity of tape - its cartridges are tape-sized and plug in just as easily - with the speed of hard disk.

Asus has put its money where its mouth is and pledged to provide free upgrades to its pre-802.11n wireless products should changes to the final version of the specification require software or hardware changes for compatibility.

Sony's PlayStation 3 production programme is "in full swing", market watcher American Technology Research (ATR) has claimed. Crucially, this means the consumer electronics giant will meet its target and ship 2m of the next-generation consoles by the end of the year.

McAfee has agreed to buy a majority stake in security policy compliance firm Citadel Security in a deal valued at $60m. The deal is designed to bolster McAfee's capabilities in the area of policy enforcement and vulnerability remediation.

IBM today rolled out 23 updated product and 11 professional services offerings for service oriented architectures (SOAs). Some use technology from recent and recent-ish acquisitions, Webify, BuildForge and Bowstreet.

As I write this, I'm on the Eurostar train, just returning from O'Reilly's OSCon (Open Source Conference) in Brussels. Some fascinating insights there; and even my own talk generated some interesting discussion. Some of the delegates, including O'Reilly himself, are promoting opensource ideas going beyond software and into society more generally. I've touched on that in this very column before now, but a related argument that's new to me is that the open/closed debate in software could become largely sidelined, as the industry focuses on software as a service (such as Google's offerings) more than as a product.

The executives willing to testify about their roles in the HP spy scandal have claimed a blissful ignorance around the legal ins and outs of obtaining phone records. Their defense has hinged on the idea that they were assured by hired investigators that any phone snooping was legal and that they did not become really concerned about how phone records were obtained until learning of the euphemism "pretexting." Even after learning about pretexting, it took executives weeks to comprehend in full the fraud behind the practice.

We've always wondered how elite reporters at publications such as the Wall Street Journal handle their communications with public relations drones. Thanks to HP's savvy investigators, we must wonder no more.